This blog entry is a reprint from 2009. Somehow, it still feels incredibly relevant culturally to where we are right now in publishing:

Now I have nothing but love for The
Missouri Review + I both respect + appreciate that the editors have the
decency to write personal responses on their rejection letters when
they like a story. That's nothing if not classy + amazing, especially
for such a top-notch (if not impenetrable) literary journal. I don't
even have beef with the editor that was kind enough to write me a
personal response. I wholeheartedly appreciate both the gesture + her
point of view. But I do have an issue with her analysis. Here's a
copy of the rejection:

If you can't make out the editor's note, it says:Hello,
Your story was interesting, but I felt like you focused too much on G.
being white--she's awful, certainly, but I don't see why race matters
there. That being said-I loved the focus on words, and how you ended
it. Please try us again soon with another piece.

Here's the deal:

While I totally appreciate the feedback + the honesty, the reality is that:

1. This short story is about the intersectionality of race, class + love in Southern California. It even says so in my cover letter

2.
The protagonist, E., a smart Chicana girl who doesn't fit in the
white or the Hispanic clique, is trying to survive at a high school
where rich white girls pretty much dominate. In the end, she falls in
love with an exchange student from [], which drives G. (the rich, white
girl) insane

3. There's only one line where the narrator
overtly mentions race, when she talks about how some rich white girls
(especially in HS) hurt people because they can (a statement I still
defend, with exceptions). And if race does matter in this story, I
think it matters more in the way that being Latina in SoCal can be a
huge obstacle to personal advancement. Sure, sure, any self-applied
Latino can succeed, but he or she has to work so much harder for it than
many white students from wealthy families who don't need to work half as hard.
Latinos, remember, are the highest employed minority in the US. But
when your parents don't speak English, or they don't speak it well, or
they're working 60 hours a week, or when no one in your family has gone
to college, that student has enormous obstacles to getting to college + acquiring cultural capital. That's
just a reality, not even a complaint really

4. Anyone who's
spent time in SoCal--especially in high school--sees the blatant
socio-economic rift between Latino + white Americans. It's slowly
changing, but the rich/poor gap is still a reality. My story doesn't blame white people
because they're white, it shows how malicious an antagonist can be
when she has money, influence + power (which, based on this country's
history, is more often a white person but doesn't necessarily have to
be)

5. Instead of shying away from things that make us
uncomfortable (e.g. race, class, racism, gossip, jealousy) my story
pretty much goes for it + tries to talk about big subjects. I'm sick of
stories of paralysis, sick of stories that don't deal with the big
issues, that are basically apolitical, antipolemical, self-centered
little works of art that have no relationship with the greater world

6. Even if my story really did
focus on race as much as the editorial assistant seemed to imply,
which I think would have been totally fine, this story is above all
else, a love story between a Chicana girl and an exchange student from [
], both of whom, use words to not only express their love for each
other, but also to empower themselves in a country where English is a
sacred rite of passage. Beyond that, this is a revenge story, where
the less-than-perfect, precocious Latina takes her revenge on the thin,
rich, white, school bully who hates the fact that all of her money +
power can't buy the protagonist's boyfriend. The protagonist's
revenge--love it or hate it--is the way she stops feeling like a victim

7.
At the end of the day, Cornell West is right: race matters. At least
to people that aren't white. Race matters less to white people because
they're the majority race (percentage-wise), so when they talk about
how we should just focus on merit, talent, skill, intelligence, voice,
stuff like that, that's spoken hegemonically: the luxury to focus on
our qualities becomes a way of differentiating us when we are racially +
culturally the same. But since different people from non-hegemonic
races are not only treated differently by white people, but actually
perceive reality differently because of this, you can see how
complicated all this gets. When a white person says to his black
friend: you're so cool dude, I don't even think of you as black. This
is a compliment coming from a white person because he's basically
saying I see the universal in you, I relate with you, I connect with
you + I don't feel like race is getting in the way. But for many
people of color, this is racial erasure. It's like someone taking away
a unique set of experiences that have shaped you, experiences
fundamentally different than those of your white friend, experiences
that are often painful, contrary to those of your friends + sometimes
distressing too, but experiences that your friend didn't have, experiences that
affect you a great deal, even when you're over them.So, I
apologize for this spiel, but I bring this up for one basic reason:
when the good-intentioned editor says "I don't see why race matters in
this story," the problem is that for many white readers, race has never
had to matter, either in life or in a story--but this is white
privilege, the privilege of being allowed to ignore your own race, something most people of color I know never get to do. When you're white + you drive a BMW, you don't get pulled over unless you're speeding. When you're black + you drive a BMW, you get pulled over just for being black + having a nice car (happens all the time, by the way). Suddenly, you become very aware of your race. Same shit walking through a gated community when you're the "wrong" color. Or when you try to become a member of your local country club. Or when you're wearing a hoodie in Samford, Florida.

And for me (a hapa who looks white + is treated
white/latino all the time), race matters a great deal, not just the part you see (or the part you think you see), but also the part you don't see (ironically, the part that has shaped me the most, the Japanese side, the blue mosaic me). Race has a huge
effect on how I see the world + how the world sees me. So, when
conservatives argue that cops aren't racist, they're not completely lying from their point of
view. They don't see racism because they're white, wealthy +
connected, + cops don't harass them, so you can see why
they actually believe what they say (of course, some don't want to see
it either because that would be a personal indictment of their simplistic cosmology). Ditto with
fiction. When minority writers or writers from minority cultures
discuss so-called minority issues in their stories that are remotely
racial, social or political, white readers + editors want to know why
does it have to be about race, gender, orientation, politics? Why
can't it just be about people? My answer: it is about
people, but people that aren't always white (or straight or male or
politically neutral or paralyzed or frivolously dramatic) who are never able to forget who they are,
whether they want to or not. Race (like other minority cultural
identities) is an everyday reality, not some thematic obsession. This
is something that's hard for white readers--even the best of them--to
grasp sometimes because they've been brainwashed with the mantra that only talent + artistic merit should be important. But racial erasure can be just as bad as racialization, especially when you tell a writer of color that nothing they've gone through is important. And yet, stories come from somewhere + that somewhere tends to come out in their stories.